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Well now, the Lord’s been good. I finally stitched the last square onto that "Memory Quilt" for my grandson, David. It’s made from scraps of his daddy’s old shirts, some of my mama’s dresses, and even a bit of his baby blanket. Took me a good while to get it all right, piecing together all those bits of our lives. But seeing it all come together, all those colors and memories woven in… mm-mm, it just warms my heart something fierce. He’s going to love it, I just know it. It’s more than just stitches, honey, it’s love. ❤️

Woman wanted a granite memorial bench for her husband's garden. Paid a $600 deposit up front, balance on delivery. I quoted $2,400, thinking that was about right for the material and shape. Then the granite I wanted had a two-month lead time. Then the supplier raised their price between order and delivery. Then the carving took longer than I told myself it would because the piece had a fault line I had to work around, and I'm not about to hand someone a bench that cracks in its first winter. Eleven weeks from deposit to install. Two trips to the quarry, one scrapped attempt at a joint, resharpening chisels halfway through because I was too stubborn to stop and do it. Netted out somewhere around $11 an hour if I count every hour. The guy who delivered it made more, and he didn't have to look at it every day for three months. I keep telling myself the next one gets priced with the lead time built in. Then I meet a widow who just lost her husband and I quote what the material costs plus a little, because charging her what the job is actually worth feels like taking money off a grave.

Thirty-five years in and I still priced a job wrong last fall. Memorial piece for a family, granite, their father's hands resting on a book. I quoted by weight because that's how I buy the stone, so it made sense in my head at the time. Fifteen hundred for the material and rough shaping. Took me six weeks. The hands alone ate three of them. Every pass of the chisel I was thinking about how those were the hands that held their kids, and I couldn't rush it. By the time I'd finished the base and the lettering I'd logged close to two hundred hours. Two hundred hours for fifteen hundred dollars. Eight bucks an hour and that's before the shop lights were on. I told the daughter what it should have cost after she picked it up. She didn't care, she was happy with the piece, paid me extra out of nowhere because she said I undersold myself. That somehow made it worse. I keep a logbook of every job with hours against what I charged. That one's going to sit there for a long time reminding me that I priced labor like it was gravel.

Widow came to the shop in March. Wanted a headstone for her husband, granite, 4 foot upright, rough face with a polished panel. She had the plot number and a drawing her grandson did of the lettering. I quoted 4,800. Material was 1,400, sandblast and polish another 900, setting with the monument company 600. That leaves 1,900 for what was eleven weeks of carving and four trips to the cemetery to check the base. I knew the number was wrong when I said it. I said it anyway. What I keep turning over is why. She asked twice if that included the setting. I said yes both times. I've been doing this thirty years and I still price grief like it's a favor I'm doing, and then I resent the stone for three months. The gallon of coffee I drink at the bench costs more than my hourly on that job. I did the math after, out of spite, and it came to 14 an hour. Raised my minimum on new commissions to 9,000 in June. First two callers hung up. Number three signed, and I'm carving it now, and the difference in how I feel holding the chisel is not small. I don't have a clean lesson here. Just that I set that price in the first five minutes of the meeting, before I'd even heard the lettering, and I've never once gotten a number right that fast.

I've been trying to paint that scratched-up yellow Formica table my mom had in the 90s for like three years now. The one where I did homework and she paid bills and we ate cereal at 10pm because nobody felt like cooking. Every attempt came out stiff or too sentimental. Last night I just went at it loose, no sketching, just blocked in the yellow and let the scratches happen with a dry brush. Painted the little chip by the corner where my brother threw a toy truck. Put a salt shaker on it because she always left one out. And it's just. Right. My husband came in and said "that's your mom's kitchen" without me telling him what it was. I don't know why that hit me so hard. Maybe because I feel like I finally painted something only I could paint. Anyway just wanted to share with people who get it. 🥲

Started a big piece this week, two figures, and I've redrawn the same left hand about fourteen times. Charcoal, oil wash, charcoal again. It's ANATOMICALLY fine, like the fingers are where they go and the proportion is right. But it's dead. It's a diagram. I can draw a face and get all the feeling I need but a hand just sits there like a glove on a table. I know a guy who went to art school who would say it's because I never learned the underlying structure, and honestly maybe that's true. But I don't want a technically perfect hand. I want the one that looks like it's mid-sentence. The one that's about to reach for something. Took a photo of my own hand holding a pencil this morning, just to stare at it, and the weird thing is the photo is boring too. The hand is boring. It's what the hand is DOING that has the life in it. Think I might just paint it wrong on purpose and see if that's closer to right. Worst case I burn it, I've done that before. 😤

I got to sorting my scrap basket this morning. Lord, it was a mess. I mean a honest-to-goodness tangle of strips and triangles and odd-shaped pieces I told myself I'd use someday. And I got to noticing how I sort 'em, by color family first, then by what they came from. That little blue floral, that's from a dress my niece wore to Easter Sunday back in ought-eight. That mustard yellow, that's a man's shirt from the thrift that I unpicked for the good seams. I don't just sort fabric, I sort memories. And I thought, well that's me all over. Can't throw nothing away if it carried a story. My grandmother was the same way, she had a button tin that was more family history than any photo album. I told my daughter this morning, I said, I don't know if I'm a quilter who saves things or a saver who quilts. She just laughed and handed me her old jeans with a tear in the knee. "Here, Mama," she said. "Add me to the pile." I reckon that's what I'll do this afternoon. Turn her jeans into something she'll give her own girl one day. Y'all got a scrap basket that's really a memory basket too? Or am I just the old woman who can't let go? 🙂

Lady wanted a granite garden stone for her husband's memorial. Personal piece, carved text, took me eleven days off and on. I charged $2,600. Did the math on the drive home. That's $40 an hour before the stone, the carbide, the dust collector, the shop wear. A plumber gets triple that and doesn't have to stand in granite dust for a week. The thing is, she was happy. She said so twice. And I still felt like I should apologize for the number. Thirty years in and I can't get past that part. I know the drill. Raise your rates. It's a skill, not a hobby. I heard all of it. But the market for a carved memorial in this town is what it is, and nobody's lining up to pay more. So I keep pricing like I'm still the apprentice and not the one who's been doing it since Reagan was in office. Does anyone here actually get what a commission is worth, or are we all just guessing and hoping nobody blinks?

i've had this rubbermaid bin under my work table for like four years. t-shirts he wore that my mom couldn't throw away and neither could i. today i just took the scissors to one of them. a faded green one from a 5k he ran in 2008. felt like i was doing something wrong for the first ten minutes. now i'm gluing a strip of it into a piece about something else entirely and it finally makes sense being there. not as a memorial or whatever. just as a color and a texture that belongs in the thing. anyone else sit on materials forever before you can touch them? or is that just the hoarder gene

Working on a portrait from a reference photo I found in an old magazine, some woman I've never seen before. And I get to the mouth and I keep redrawing it and it's not working, and then I step back and realise, it's my mother's mouth. The upper lip thinner, the way the corner tucks in. I didn't put it there on purpose. It just came out of my hand. I don't even have a great relationship with my mother. So that's unsettling. Has your hand ever just. Drawn something from your life without asking you first? Like the muscle memory knows things you don't want it to know?

Been humidifying the same page for four days. Blotter, Gore-Tex, weights, the whole slow ritual. It comes out flat and soft, I set it under glass, and by evening it's cupped again at the corner like it's remembering where it was folded for eighty years. I know the answer. More time. Less heat. Patience I don't have this week. The annoying part is it's a beautiful page, a map of the Bohus coast with a hairline tear right through the water, and I want it for a piece, and instead I'm standing over a tray at 7pm spraying distilled water on something that has decided it prefers being wrong. Conservators keep telling me paper has a memory. Mine is holding a grudge.

I've painted the same window in my apartment maybe forty times this year and I still don't feel like I've cracked it. Same light, same chipped frame, same view of the brick wall across the street that my landlord swears he'll repaint. When I tell people I'm a watercolor painter they think it's soft, gentle, forgiving, and then they watch me ruin the twelfth wash in a row because the paper dried too fast or the pigment settled wrong and suddenly it's not so cute anymore haha. It's not that I can't paint other things. I can. I do commissions, portraits, still lifes, whatever pays. But this window is the one I come back to at the end of the day when no one's watching, when I'm not trying to be impressive. There's something about how the light hits it at 4pm in the fall, this warm dusty gold that only lasts about twenty minutes, and every time I try to catch it I get three quarters of the way there and then lose it. My partner keeps telling me to just do a bigger version, like scale is the problem. It's not. The problem is I keep wanting it to be a photograph and it needs to be a memory instead. Anyway I had a good wash today, genuinely, one of the better ones. Thought I'd tell people who might understand the particular ache of chasing the same thing over and over and being kind of in love with the chase itself.

A student brought in a phone photo of her grandmother's kitchen and asked if she could paint from it. I said of course, but that's not the real question. The real question is why she wanted to. She said because the light in that room doesn't exist anymore, the afternoon sun through the window where her grandmother used to stand. So I told her to go find a room with the same kind of light, sit in it, and paint the memory anyway. The photo gives you the facts. It can't give you the hour you were there. We don't paint what we see. We paint what it was like to see it. That's the whole job and nobody teaches it anymore because you can't put it in a curriculum.

I've been fighting this piece since March. Charcoal on paper, 40x60, my mother at 29, which is two years younger than I am now. I used a photo I hadn't looked at in probably a decade, one where she's laughing with her whole face and you can't tell anything was wrong yet. Drew it four times. Burned the second one, actually put it in the fire pit out back, which felt dramatic and then felt correct. The thing that finally did it was stopping trying to make her look like the photo and just drawing the mouth from memory. Her real mouth, the one she got when she was tired. Not the smile. I cried a little, which is embarrassing to type but there it is. It's hanging now. Cheap black frame from the craft store, nothing fancy. And every night I get up around 3 to pee and walk right past her face in the dark and I still don't know if it's good. But it's UP. It's on a wall, in my house, where people will see it. Some work you make to show people and some work you make to put something down. This one was the second kind and I'm only now figuring out that counts as a win too.

My granddaughter brought me a box last month, things she found cleaning out her mama's closet. In it was my grandmother's church dress. Navy, little covered buttons down the front, worn thin at the elbows. She passed in 1979 and that dress has been folded in a cedar chest since before my youngest was born. I laid it on the table this morning meaning to take the back panel for a quilt I'm building. Memory quilt, for my great-grandbaby due in November. I got the scissors in my hand and then I just stood there. Couldn't do it. Went and made coffee instead, came back, sat down. Finally I did cut it. Took a deep breath and went slow. And honey, that navy sits right up against a red print I pulled from my own old housecoat like they were made for each other. The Lord puts things together like that sometimes. Now listen, I know some of you would've kept the dress whole and hung it in a frame, and I'm not saying that's wrong. But cloth was made to be used. My grandmother wore that dress to praise the Lord every Sunday for years, and now a piece of it's going to wrap a baby that won't be born till fall. That feels like the dress finishing what it started. Any of you ever cut into something you weren't sure you had the right to cut? I'd like to hear it.

Had a show down in Montgomery last month and it set me straight about something. On Instagram, people be writing me all week about the small pieces, the little memory blocks, the ones that fit in a frame. Those sold out quick, no fuss. But the two big quilts I carried down there, the ones that took me months, the ones I prayed over at the machine? Those got all the looking and none of the buying. Gallery owner told me flat out that collectors want the statement piece for the wall, that's where the money is, and she's probably right for her side of things. But here's what I told her. The little ones are how somebody who never bought a quilt in their life gets brave enough to buy one. That's how the young folks start. That's how the next generation of collectors gets made. If I only made big ones for rich folks, I'd be feeding the same few mouths and starving everybody else. Funny part is, the two big ones did end up finding homes. Both ladies followed me on Instagram first, bought a small block two years ago, and worked their way up. So maybe the gallery's right about the wall and I'm right about the doorway. You got to have both.

I went back to a street in Malleswaram today. There was this old house with a blue veranda I'd sketched in 2022, beautiful chettiar-style columns, the whole thing sagging just a little in that way old houses do. I wanted to paint it properly this time, in watercolour, give it the treatment. Pulled up to the spot and it's a construction site. Apartment going up, probably 14 floors from the look of the pit. I sat on the compound wall of the thing next door and painted it anyway from memory. Came out alright actually, maybe better than if I'd had the real thing in front of me, because I had to really remember what I loved about it. Weird feeling, documenting things as they disappear. But I'm glad I have that old sketchbook at home. At least someone drew it.

Got the last of the granite for the memorial piece I'm working on. It was a beast to find the right color and veining. Took a few trips to the quarry, but this slab feels right. Now to get it back to the shop without breaking it.

I wiped the same forearm four times this morning. Not the whole figure, just the forearm, from the elbow to the wrist, and each time it came back slightly worse than the one before it. The problem is the light in the studio changed between Tuesday and today. Nothing dramatic, just that grey February light of Lyon that has no opinion about anything, and now the arm I painted on Tuesday looks like it belongs to a different room. So I scrape it down and try again and it is still wrong. At the fourth attempt I realised I was painting the memory of Tuesday's arm instead of the one in front of me. Very humbling. The model comes back Thursday. I will probably do a fifth. Voilà. In the meantime I am looking at a corner of the canvas I am actually happy with, a bit of the shirt collar, and pretending the rest of it does not exist.

Saturday, open studios, and I'm not paying attention because I'm talking to a man about his dead father's shed for twenty minutes. Turn around and there's a small bright green sticker on the lower corner of the big paper piece. Some kind of dinosaur. I left it. It's still on there. Two days now. Partly I'm annoyed. That's a piece I've been fighting since March, and now it's got a stegosaurus on it. Partly I think it's the only honest thing that happened in that room all day, because it was the one mark nobody was performing over. The kid saw a thing and stuck a thing to it and walked off. No statement, no price list, no explanation about tension and memory. The friend who helped me hang says take it off before the next thing. She's right, obviously. I just keep not doing it. Anyone else had their work improved by someone under the age of six